Jose Basso.

(1949-)

Josè Basso was born in Chile in 1949 and later graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Chile. He became a professor of art at the same institution, while continuing to develop his skill as artist. He was granted a number of prestigious scholarships through the years, including one in Paris in 1981, Amigos del Arte in 1982, Fundacion Andes in 1991 and Fondart in 2001.

Basso’s first professional recognition occurred when he won the Valparaiso International Biennial Exhibition Prize for Painting. In 1999, his work was selected by the Worldwide Millennium Painting exhibition in London. He has represented his country in numerous international exhibitions and his works are included in the collection of Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, as well as the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. Basso has also been honored with a commission from Queen Sophia of Spain to create two paintings for the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid. Having fallen in love with his work while on a trip to Santiago, Jean Kennedy Smith, American diplomat, former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, and sister of John F Kennedy, is also among Basso’s admirers. In 2007 he was commissioned to paint an important mural for the Office of Export Administration in Washington, D.C. And in 2011 he was honored with a retrospective of his work in Santiago's National Museum of Fine Arts. Basso’s work is included in a number of prestigious corporate, public and private collections worldwide.

With his elegantly simplified forms and fine brushwork, complimented by his signature use of color, and masterful ability to capture light, Basso’s evocative, serenely beautiful creations, the perfect blend of realism and abstraction, are universal in their appeal.

"I feel the need to use art as a means to rescue and reflect only what is good. I want to make a kind of art that means something and it means something when it affects and seduces us, when it speaks from within its own silence." - Jose Basso

2018. Original oil on canvas. 60 x 40”.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 20 x 24”.

Luna Llena de Primavera.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 60”.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48”.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40”.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40”.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48”.

Paisaje Amarillo y Cerro Azul.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48".

California Dreams.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 36”.

Sol a Traves de la Niebla.

2018. Original oil on canvas 30 x 40”.

Despues de la Tormenta.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48". SOLD.

Luna Resplandeciente.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 30". SOLD.

Luna Resplandeciente II.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 20”. HOLD.

Calida Neblina del Verano.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 24".

4 Galpons al Atardecer.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 60”.

Tarde de Sol.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 30".

Luces en la Niebla II.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 60”.

Luna Creciente con Campo Amarillo.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 36". SOLD.

Campo Amarillo en Casablanca.

2016. Original oil on canvas 30 x 40".

Casablanca Valley Triptych.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 30" each panel.

Sky with Orange Light.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 30”.

Niebla Nocturna.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 60 x 40". SOLD.

Lights at Dawn.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 36". SOLD.

Morning Moon.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 60". SOLD.

Resplandor en la Mañana. (Glow in the Morning)

2013. Original Oil on Canvas. 20 x 24". SOLD.

Eclipse Lunar.

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 14 x 18". SOLD.

Colores Mágicos.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 24”.

Large Barn with Thorns.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40".

Nubes Sobre Cielo Turqueza.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 30”.

Campo Amarillo con 2 Graneros.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 36".

Galpon Turquera II.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 14".

Romantic Landscape III.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 24".

3 Casas en el Horizonte.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 48".

Amanecer Frente al Mar.

Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48".

Val Paraiso con Cielo Amarillo. (Val Paraiso with Yellow Sky)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40".

3 Galpones con Luz Amarilla.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 36”.

Swirl of Clouds.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 60 x 30".

Cielo con Nubes.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 24".

Nubes en el Horizonte.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 48".

Nubes del Atardecer (Sunset in Clouds).

2015. Original oil on canvas. 60 x 30".

Luz de Medianoche.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 60 x 40".

Alcatraz.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 48".

Vista of Alcatraz.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 60".

Large Barn with Thorns.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40".

Luces y Estrellas (Lights and Stars).

2015. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 48".

Niebla Rosa. (Pink Fog).

2015. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 48".

La Luz de la Noche.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 60”.

Conjunction en Purpura.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 36 x 24".

Yate en el Horizonte. (Yacht on the Horizon)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 14 x 18".

Yate en la Bahia. (Yacht on the Bahia)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 20 x 24".

Abriendo el Cielo.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 14 x 18".

Cielo Abriendose.

2017. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 14".

Luna Sobre Los Andes.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 30". SOLD.

Luces Entre la Niebla.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 36".

Casa Azul. (Blue House)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 30 x 24".

Casa y Espino.

2014. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 30".

Las Nubes Rosadas. (Pink Clouds)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40".

Nube Purpura. (Purple Cloud)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 18 x 14".

Antes del Amanecer.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 60".

Cielo con Nubes. (Sky with Clouds)

2014. Original Oil on Canvas. 20 x 24".

Blue Mountain.

Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40".

Nube Obscura.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 14 x 18”.

Nubes Bajas.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 36”.

Sol Rojo.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 24 x 36".

Las Nubes Rosadas

2014. Original oil on canvas. 40 x 30”.

Sol en la Niebla.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 30 x 40”.

Nubes Blancas.

2018. Original oil on canvas. 48 x 24”.

Davide Battistin

(1970- )

"True art has no use for so many proclamations and is produced in silence." - Proust

Born in Venice in 1970, Davide Battistin lives and works in his studio in the Canareggio neighborhood in Venice. His work is first and foremost a pleasure to look at. Trained at the Academia di Belle Arte in Venezia and Athens, Davide has a profound ability to capture the wonders of a view of the Venetian lagoon, a corner of Piazza San Marco, the architectural beauty of the Madonna della Salute Church, and transform them into a perception, not an image. Firmly rooted in lessons learned from the old masters, and years spent restoring frescos in the Palazzo Ducale, La Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Palazzo Mocenigo and many private Venetian palazzi, he advances meaning by underlining the beauty of the commonplace. Davide’s approach to painting is that of a true disciple and is based on a sound background in drawing, in extenuating practical preparation, and in en plain-air observation of atmospheric phenomena where the rhythms of the act of painting coincide with those of the view itself. You have seen Venice before, but not this way.

Davide has exhibited regularly at the renowned Biennale d’ Arte Sacre and Biennale Internazionale d’Arte in Venice, the oldest and most revered international art exhibition in the world, since 1998 where his work has garnered awards and accolades. His work has been the focus of numerous exhibitions and one man shows in Venice, London, New York and San Francisco.

Bacino di San Marco.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 27". SOLD.

Canal Grande La Salute.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 27". SOLD.

Bacino di San Marco at Dusk.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 37". SOLD.

La Salute.

2016. Original oil on canvas. 17 1/4 x 20 1/2". SOLD.

Punta della Dogana.

18 x 27". Original oil on canvas. 18 x 27". SOLD.

Bacino San Marco. Veduta Del Bacino.

2015. Original oil on canvas 18 x 39". SOLD.

Caronte.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 39 x 39". SOLD.

San Giorgio.

2015. Original oil on canvas. 18 x 27". SOLD.

Isola di San Giorgio Veduta della Basilica.

2015. Original oil on canvas 18 x 27".

Paige Bradley.

(1974-)

Born in Carmel, California Paige Bradley knew she would be an artist by the age of nine. Immersed in nature and art, Bradley's fascination with the human figure began early. She believed that through the figure an artist could speak a universal language that is timeless and essential.

Paige Bradley started drawing from the nude model by the age of ten and by fifteen was studying intensely at university campuses during the summer months. Knowing that she was naturally a sculptor, at seventeen she cast her first bronze sculpture.

Educated at Pepperdine University, Paige spent a year in Florence, Italy with the university’s study program. There she took classes at the Florence Academy of Art, which included art history. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1994, Bradley left Pepperdine and entered into what would be a ten year apprenticeship with renowned sculptor Richard MacDonald. She went on to continue her education at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied sculpture and learned to paint and print in several different mediums. Her work remains in the Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts.

In 1995 she was assistant sculptor on a monument for the Atlanta Olympic Games. In 2001 she was voted into the National Sculpture Society, the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club and The Salmagundi Club as a professional sculptor. In 2006 one of her sculptures was selected to become a prestigious international award for young dancers. A replica of the sculpture is now awarded to a talented dancer selected by a panel of judges annually from Ballet International.

Annually, Paige Bradley has several solo exhibitions, and her work can be seen in selected galleries throughout the world. In 2004 she moved her studio from California to New York City. In the spring of 2007, she moved to London, where she worked until 2016. Paige now resides and works full time again in the United States. Her work is housed in prominent public and private collections across the globe, among them, actress Nicole Kidman, radio personality Robin Quivers, architect and designer Campion Platt and music producer Harvey Goldsmith.

Paige’s work is full of dichotomies: both the beautiful and the ugly, the liberated and the contained, the falling and the floating. She is always in control of form but not imprisoned by its literality. The subject matter becomes the most important -- not narrowly feminist, but rather humanistic betrayals of modern emotion. Paige’s work is becoming a valuable keystone for the missing figure in contemporary art. Entering the middle of her career, Paige Bradley’s talent and artistic achievements have already gained her much notoriety.

Artist's Statement.

Focusing on tensions and liberations in my work, I feel most of our emotions are locked into a existential cocoon. My sculptures show the human race as a singular individual searching for connection but finding only alienation.

My recent work has become a symbol of struggle -- both being contained and liberating ourselves from self-inflicted boundaries. Fears of ostracism, avoiding distinction and hiding from greatness are all thoughts that come to mind. These fears create sculptures wrapped in extraordinary tension. The figures struggle to unveil themselves in order to become understood and known. These bound figures give me a sense of unrest as if too much life is jammed into too restrictive of space. I feel as if I am trying to live my truth free and unveiled in a society that would rather keep us contained.

From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a container already built for us to fit inside: a social security number, a gender, a race, a profession, an I.Q. I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in than what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies?

Would we still be able to exist if we are authentically “un-contained”?

I attempt to expand my sculptures beyond the human flesh of the figure and create the brilliance within us. Simultaneously, I cannot help but to see a dangerous dichotomy between falling apart and expanding beyond our limitations. When devastation becomes deliverance, ashes from the past can become the foundations of the future.

"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." - Rosa Luxemburg

Soaring.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 35 x 12 x 34".

Believe.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 26 x 5 x 4".

Believe Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 74 x 12 x 12".

Conception Column.

Bronze. 80 x 12 x 12". Edition of 12.

Conception Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 80 x 12 x 12".

Soar.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 21 x 9 x 9".

Soar Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 74 x 12 x 12".

Bow.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 39 x 21 x 12".

Madelyn in Red.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 15 x 8 x 8".

Birth.

Bronze. Edition of 50. 20 x 5 x 8".

Birth.

Column. Bronze. Edition of 12. 67.25 x 14 x 13".

Evolution.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 30 x 36 x 10".

Vertigo Studies.

Bronze. 8" variable.

Balance.

Lifesize. Bronze. 84 x 41 x 63". Also available in half life and maquette scale.

Academia.

Bronze. 30 x 7 x 5". Also available on column.

Academia Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 74 x 15 x 31".

Academia II.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 30 x 27 x 5".

Erato.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 35.5 x 10.5 x 14".

Erato Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 74 x 12 x 12".

Release.

Half Life. Bronze. Edition of 12. 43 x 20 x 20".

Wrapped.

Bronze and silk. 20 x 5 x 8".

Harmony Column.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 67.5 x 24 x 17".

Couture.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 21 x 14 x 28".

Dreamer.

Bronze. L x 12 x 20". Edition of 8.

Balance.

Column. Bronze. Edition of 12. 72" tall.

Balance.

Bronze. Third life. Edition of 50. 32 x 24 x 16".

Aspire.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 35.5 x 10.5 x 14".

Ballet Femme.

Bronze. Edition of 18. 30.5 x 27" x 13".

Liberty.

Bronze. 30 x 14 x 12".

Momentum.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 18.5 x 26.5 x 13.25".

Visionary Column.

Bronze 75 x 12 x 12". Edition of 8.

Visionary Column.

In the New York home of Campion Platt as seen in Architectural Digest.

Freedom Bound.

Bronze and Silk. 21 x 28 x 15". Edition of 8.

Source.

Bronze. Edition of 50. 14 x 10 x 9".

Summer.

Column. Bronze. Edition of 12. 72" H.

In the Studio with Principal Dancer, Alexsandra Meijer.

Paige Bradley working in her London studio with ABT and San Jose Ballet Principal, Alexsandra Meijer.

Alexander Calder.

(1898 - 1976)

Alexander Calder is best known for creating mobiles—sculptures composed of abstract shapes moving through space. Born in 1898, in the Philadelphia area, Calder came from a family of artists. Both his father and his grandfather were sculptors. After graduating from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 with a degree in mechanical engineering, "Sandy" (as he was known by his friends) held various jobs before entering the Art Students League of New York in 1923. At first a painter, he studied under Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, , Kenneth Hays Miller, and John Sloan, and was a classmate of John Graham. In the early 1920s he worked as an illustrator, covering such events as the circus. His sketches of circus acts rekindled his childhood fascination with animals, a subject that became central to his art. In 1926 he went to Paris for the first time and stayed there until the fall of 1927. An active participant in the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the two World Wars, Calder had a wide circle of friends and colleagues in the arts. He met many of them through performances of his entourage of small sculptures, Circus, in the late twenties and through his membership from 1931 in the Abstraction-Création group, a loose alliance of artists promoting diverse multi-national trends in abstract art.

It was at this time that he began making small moveable animal figures in wood and in wire, using the wire as if he were drawing in space. By 1928, Calder was exhibiting his wire sculptures both in the United States and in France, where he resided periodically throughout his life. Calder created his first abstract wire sculptures in the spring of 1931, and that year Galerie Percier in Paris held an exhibition of these works, which Arp called "stabiles.” By 1932, Calder was composing his forms with the intention of making them move through space. First he experimented with motorized sculptures. But soon, by precisely adjusting the weight and balance of each shape, he created works that floated through space, propelled only by air currents. Known as mobiles, the term was coined by Calder’s fellow artist, Marcel Duchamp.

Dividing his time between homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Saché, France, Calder produced a large body of works in a wide variety of mediums. His work was exhibited in several large retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964), the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1965), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976). In November 1976, soon after the opening of this last retrospective, which he personally installed, Calder died in New York.

La Noce.

1974. Original gouache on paper. SOLD.

Plaisir du Neophyte.

1976. Original lithograph. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 100. 20 7/16 x 28 3/8". SOLD.

Marc Chagall.

(Russia 1887- Paris 1985)

Considered by many to be the finest color lithographer of the 20th century, Marc Chagall created an impressive oeuvre filled with whimsical and thought provoking works. His mastery of printmaking extended to etching and aquatint as well, and his fascination with these techniques provided important new avenues for his creativity. Chagall's unique style and iconography have made him one of the most highly collected artists in history.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born in Vitebsk, Russia in 1887 and lived to be 97 years old. His style, while reflective of cubist, expressionist and surrealist affinities, is distinctly personal. His contribution to early modern painting and printmaking has been of the first order. Chagall studied briefly with a local artist in Vitebsk, and in 1908 studied at the academy in St. Petersburg. In 1910, he went to Paris, where he would live for most of the rest of his long life. There, he met the poets Max Jacob, Blaise Centrars and Andre Salmeon and the painters Modigliani, Delaunay, LaFresnaye, and other cubists and independents. The complexities of Chagall’s aesthetics are apt to be obscured somewhat by the whimsical fantastic subject matter. Although cubism had an early and formative influence upon his works, it did not detract from his uniqueness of expression. The impact of cubist structure and spatial handling is evident in I and my Village (1911) and Over Vitebsk (1916), both in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Thereafter, his style becomes increasingly unique and the cubist aspects operate less evidently.

Appollinaire introduced Chagall to Herwarth Walden, the German publisher and dealer, in Berlinin 1914. This resulted in Chagall’s first one-man show in the same year. He returned to Russiato marry. After the revolution of 1917, he was appointed Commissar of Fine Arts for Vitebskand founded an art school there. He designed murals for the Moscow Jewish Theatre in 1922 and then left for Parisby way of Berlin, where he stayed long enough to make engravings as illustrations for a book. The poet Cendrars was responsible for Chagall’s meeting with the dealer Ambroise Vollard. His first retrospective exhibition was given at the Galerie Barbazange-Hodebert, Parisin 1924. His style became increasingly romantic and devoted to fantastic narratives during the middle 1920s. Chagall’s first lithography plates (30 in all 1922-23) were executed in crayon on lithographic paper. The Jewish Wedding (1926), a gouache and chalk composition, disclosed another tendency of his Russian origin. His first New York show dates from 1926. In 1927, he undertook the illustration of La Fontaine’s Fables, completing the 100 plates in 1930. In 1931, he traveled toPalestine andSyria to study themes for Biblical engravings, another Vollard commission.

By now, Chagall had become internationally famous, and a large retrospective in 1933 at the Basel Art Museum increased his prestige. He was disquieted, however, by political developments in Europe during the early 1930s and the increasingly severe persecution and threat of war lead him to paint religious works of a darkly exciting kind. His apprehensions were aggravated by a visit to Poland in 1935.

In 1939, the first prize in the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, was given to Chagall, and in 1941, he settled in the United States at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art. At first rejuvenated by his new environment, he was deeply saddened by the death of his wife in 1944. Before returning to Paris in 1946, he completed the sets for Stravinsky’s Firebird and other theatrical designs. He also produced 13 color lithographs for One Thousand and One Nights. On his return to Paris, Chagall went to master printer Mourlot, who was responsible for the revival of lithography after the war.

Chagall had retrospective shows in 1947 in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, and was represented at the 1948 Venice Biennial. In 1949, he worked in Venice, primarily with ceramics. In that year, he also painted an important canvas, The Red Sun. This was an allegory invoking memories of his late wife and the rich colored imagery of Russian folk fantasy, which was always so much a part of his art.

The 1950s brought additional honors to Chagall, not the least of which was the commission from the Joseph Neufeld and the Women’s Zionist Organization of America to design 12 stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center near Jerusalem. A retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1970 culminated a long and prolific career.

Carmen.

1966. Original Lithograph. Handsigned in black crayon, Chagall. Hand numbered in white crayon 7/150. From the hand signed and numbered edition of 150 with text. (Apart from the regular poster edition of 3000 and hand signed and numbered edition of 200 without text. ) 40 x 26".

1954. Original lithograph. From the edition of 2500. 14 7/8 x 10 13/16”.

Untited from Cirque.

1967. Original lithograph. From the edition of 250. 16 3/4 x 12 3/4”.

A La Femme Qu'Est-il Reste?...

1967. In the Land of the Gods suite. Original lithograph. Hand signed. Edition of 75. 25 1/2 x 19 5/8".

The Ballet.

1969. Original Lithograph. 14 x 10".

La Plafond de L'Opera de Paris.

1965. Original Lithograph. 13 x 9 1/2".

Jules Cheret.

(1836-1932)

As the father of color lithography and of the art poster, Jules Cheret's innovations have influenced everyone from Toulouse-Lautrec, who called him "The Master," to modern advertisers. His work transcended the realm of "commercial" art, however, and his painting and pastels were eagerly acquired by influential collectors, as well as fellow artists like Degas and Monet. Cheret's pioneering efforts in color printmaking were an important contribution to the excitement and energy associated with La Belle Époque.

Jules Cheret was born to a poor family of artisans in Paris on May 31, 1836. His formal education ended at the age of thirteen, when his father placed him in a three-year apprenticeship to a lithographer in order to help the family. He continued to work for several lithographers while attending the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. Cheret had some success selling sketches for covers to various music publishers but it didn’t afford him the luxury of pursuing a career inart. At this point he went toLondon to study technical advancements in color lithography. After six months of drawing pictures for a furniture company catalog Cheret returned toParis.

In 1858, young Cheret sold a poster design for Orphée aux Enfers toJacquesOffenbach. The poster was a success but when no commission followed, Cheret again returned toLondon. There he barely supported himself doing posters for operas, circuses and music halls. A turning point in Cheret’s career developed when a friend of his introduced him to perfume manufacturerEugeneRimmel. Cheret did floral designs for the Rimmel products and in 1866 Rimmel advanced the funds that enabled Cheret to return toParis and set up his own lithography studio.

The early poster designers used on or two colors on tinted paper, or in red and green strongly outlined in black. In 1890 Cheret abandoned this primitive technique altogether and discontinued using black for a softer outline in blue. From that time on he used flowing yellows, reds, and oranges against cool greens, and vibrant blues. Cheret was greatly affected by the works ofRubens,Watteau, and especiallyTiepolo, whose strong influence is reflected in the vertical composition of many of Cheret’s posters. The technique of color-printing as applied to posters was, if not invented, at least enormously developed and refined byJulesCheret, Lautrec’s most distinguished predecessor in this field, during the eighteen-eighties.

Cheret won a silver medal at the Universal Exposition of 1879 and a gold medal at the Exposition of 1889. In the same year, an exhibition of about one hundred of his posters, pastels, lithographs, drawings, and sketches for posters was held at the Theatre d’Application. This proved to be another turning point for Cheret. A petition to have Cheret decorated was signed by leading figures in the arts, including Rodin, Daudet, de Goncourt and Massennet. In 1891, he became a Chevalier de la Légion of Honor, cited as “the creator of anart industry.”

Cheret produced over one thousand posters in both color and black and white. However, after 1900 he stopped taking poster commissions on a regular basis in order to devote more time to his paintings and pastels. In 1912 Cheret was honored by theLouvreMuseumwith retrospective exhibit atPavillionde Marsan. Cheret had often wintered in Nice and toward the end of his life he lived there exclusively until his death in 1932 at the age of 96. A large collection of his works is on display at the Hermitage museum inRussia.

Cheret’s charming, frivolous Harlequins, columbines, and Pierrots, his girls and boys in masks and fancy dresses, were a delight to the eye; his brilliant yet delicate colors danced like flickering sunbeams over the gray stonewalls of Paris. The posters turned out while other contemporary designers were by comparison, vastly inferior in composition, crude in color, and slipshod in execution. For more than a decade, until the advent of Lautrec, Cheret had no serious rival; he was the only creative artist who really understood the decorative possibilities of the poster.

Salvador Dali.

(1904-1989)

One of the most famous and prolific artists of the twentieth century, Dali’s fantastic imagery and flamboyant personality made him the best known artist of the Surrealist movement. Born in Figueres, Spain in the northeastern province of Catalonia, Dalí trained in the early 1920s at the Madrid Academy, where he perfected his realistic and meticulously detailed style. However, after reading Freud, his passions turned to dreams and the unconscious. It was Salvador Dalí’s surrealist work, using bizarre dream imagery to create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner world, that solidified the artist as a Modern Master.

Salvador Dalí's work can be found in the most prestigious private and public collections worldwide as well as in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, among them the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Venice, the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Surrealism in Menlun, France and the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain. The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is dedicated solely to Dalí's work, and three museums in Spain are part of the artist's legacy, the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, the Gala Dalí Castle Museum-House in Púbol and the Salvador Dalí Museum-House in Portlligat.

These works of impeccable provenance by the Surrealist master have been part of the Argillet family collection since their creation by Dali during his collaborative years with Pierre Argillet and demonstrate high standards of quality, and the empassioned collaboration between an artist and his publisher. The friendship between Dali and his publisher, Pierre Argillet, spanned five decades. Argillet was an avid collector of Futurist, Dadaist and Surrealist works and had, from very early on, met with the major artists of the 20th century. But it was with Salvador Dali that a long and fruitful collaboration developed. They remained friends until Dali’s death in 1989.

"Corridor of Katmandu"

1969-70. Original etching in two colors. 25" x 20". Hippies series. Hand signed and numbered.

Edgar Degas.

Edgar Degas seems never to have reconciled himself to the label of "impressionist" preferring to call himself a "realist" or "Independent." Nevertheless, he was one of the group’s founders, an organizer of its exhibitions, and one of its most important core members. Like the Impressionists, he sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern life, yet he showed little interest in painting plain air landscapes, favoring scenes in theaters and cafés illuminated by artificial light, which he used to clarify the contours of his figures, adhering to his academic training.

Degas was born in 1834, the scion of a wealthy banking family, and was educated in the classics, including Latin, Greek, and ancient history, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His father recognized his son’s artistic gifts early, and encouraged his efforts at drawing by taking him frequently to Paris museums. Degas began by copying Italian Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, and trained in the studio of Louis Lamothe, who taught in the traditional Academic style, with its emphasis on line and its insistence on the crucial importance of draftsmanship. Degas was also strongly influenced by the paintings and frescoes he saw during several long trips to Italy in the late 1850s; he made many sketches and drawings of them in his notebooks.

Evidence of Degas’s classical education can be seen in his relatively static, frieze-like early painting, Young Spartans Exercising (ca. 1860; National Gallery, London), done while he was still in his twenties. Yet despite the title, and the suggestion of classical drapery on some of the figures in the background, there is little that places the subject of this painting in ancient Greece. Indeed, it has been noted that the young girls have the snub noses and immature bodies of "Montmartre types," the forerunners of the dancers Degas painted so often throughout his career. After 1865, when the Salon accepted his history painting The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Degas did not paint Academic subjects again, focusing his attention on scenes of modern life. He began to paint scenes of such urban leisure activities as horse racing and, after about 1870, of café-concert singers and ballet dancers.

Degas’s choice of subject matter reflects his modern approach. He favored scenes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, the figure’s pose is difficult to decipher, viewed from a steep angle with both her feet and her head at the bottom of the picture, yet it conveys a sense of the dancer’s flexibility.

Degas absorbed artistic tradition and outside influences and reinterpreted them in innovative ways. Following the opening of trade with Japan in 1854, many French artists, including Degas, were increasingly influenced by Japanese prints. But whereas his contemporaries often infused their paintings with Eastern imagery Degas abstracted from these prints their inventive compositions and points of view, particularly in his use of cropping and asymmetry. Degas had also observed how sixteenth-century Italian mannerists similarly framed their subjects, sometimes cutting off part of a figure. For example, in A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers, through the decades until Dancers, Pink and Green, which displays a subtle grasp of the characteristic postures and attire of the top-hatted gentlemen he portrays. By 1885, most of his more important works were done in pastel. He submitted a suite of nudes, all rendered in pastel, to the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886; among these was Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, which depicts another of Degas’s favorite themes, the use of hatching gives a sense of swaying grass. The immediacy of the moment is captured in the raised leg of the horse in the foreground and the foreshortened, angled approach of the vigorous horse in the background. The Singer in Green, an unusual work from this period, is an unexpected instance of Degas presenting an outdoor scene with no figures, which shows an imaginative and expressive use of color and freedom of line that may have arisen, at least in part, as a result of his struggle to adapt to his deteriorating vision.

Degas continued working as late as 1912, when he was forced to leave the studio in Montmartre in which he had labored for more than twenty years. He died five years later in 1917, at the age of eighty-three.

Etude d'Apres 'La Sibille de Delphe'.

1855-56. Original pencil drawing with white gouache. SOLD.

Willem de Kooning.

(1904-1997)

Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Willem de Kooning grew up in an impoverished household and attended the Rotterdam Academy, training in fine and commercial arts. In 1926, the adventurous young artist stowed away on a ship bound for Argentina. While the ship was docked in Virginia, de Kooning slipped off, skirted immigration and made his way to New Jersey- and so began the rest of his life.

In New Jersey, de Kooning found work as a house painter. Large brushes and fluid paints were the tools of this trade, ones that he would continue to utilize throughout his artistic career. His dual foundations in drawing and craftsmanship underlay all of his work, even his most abstract paintings.

De Kooning's next stop was New York, where he forged his artistic career. The Jazz Age was in full swing when he moved to the city, and he quickly fell under the sway of the lyrical freedom of jazz and the abstract art made by other artists under its influence. New York also brought him into contact with the work of Henri Matisse and with contemporaries including John Graham and Arshile Gorky, with whom he developed a particularly close and inspiring friendship.

In 1929, the Great Depression brought the Jazz Age to a crashing end. As part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) program, in the 1930s de Kooning was commissioned to design public murals; he worked under Fernand Leger, who proved to be an important influence. Though his studies for the murals were never realized they were among his first abstractions, and the experience of working on this project spurred him to pursue art making full time.

By the 1940s, de Kooning had gained prominence as an artist. Over the course of a career lasting nearly seven decades, he would work through a wide array of styles, eventually cementing himself as a crucial link from New York School painting to European modernism. Physical labor and countless revisions were constants in his work, which ranged from abstraction to figuration, often merging the two. "I never was interested in how to make a good painting..." he once said. "I didn't work on it with the idea of perfection, but to see how far one could go..." The female figure was an especially fertile subject for the artist. His paintings of women were among his most controversial works during his lifetime and contuse to be debated today. His works are among the most highly collectible of our time.

David Drebin.

"Get lost in dreams. The truth is in there."

Internationally-renowned and New York City-based photographer and multidisciplinary artist David Drebin, is celebrated for creating spectacular shots of dazzling subjects including photographs that tell a tale, voyeuristic scenes with people and dream-like city and landscapes that evoke emotions, psychological perspectives and insightful reflections into the viewers’ own imagination and experiences. When asked “What do you do?”, Drebin says “I chase dreams.”

His work is often described as epic, spectacular, dramatic, cinematic, dreamy, imaginative, smart, sexy, elegant, and unexpected, appealing to new patrons of the arts and the most sophisticated of collectors.

A graduate of Parsons School for Design, David’s career began in commercial photography and he quickly made a name for himself advancing into the world of contemporary fine arts. His unique vision, distinctive depth and often passion or tension-filled images provide an infinite surface for the imagination making his work highly desirable as art to adorn and complete the most beautiful spaces, as well as, for periodic high profile campaigns.

Throughout his career, Drebin has worked with individuals, A-list celebrities and global powerhouse brands such as Mercedes, American Express, Adidas, The May Fair Hotel, MTV, Nike, Breil, Sony, Davidoff and many more. He has contributed to top publications such as Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, VOGUE, ELLE, countless photography publications, Condé Nast Traveler, and National Geographic.

Collected worldwide, David is represented by some of the finest art galleries in the world. Windsor Fine Art is honored to be among them.

Sundown over Rome.

Digital C Print Photograph. Limited Edition.

Morning Glory.

Digital C print photograph. Limited Edition.

Horses in Paradise.

Digital C print photograph.

The Sea.

Digital C print photograph.

Capri.

Digital C print photograph.

Portofino Nights.

Digital C print photograph.

Dreams of Florence.

Digital C print photograph.

The Amalfi Coast.

Digital C print photograph.

Balloons over Paris.

Digital C print photograph.

Paris at Night.

Digital C print photograph.

Electric City (New York).

Digital C print photograph.

Jerusalem.

Digital C print photograph.

Balloons over San Francisco.

Digital C print photograph.

All of a Sudden.

Digital C print photograph.

Canyon of Dreams.

Digital C print photograph.

Photographer, David Drebin.

Albrecht Durer.

(1471 - 1528)

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremburg in 1471, the third child of a goldsmith who had trained in the Netherlands with the “great masters.” As a young man, Dürer was trained in his father’s shop. It is essential to understand the importance of the skill that he acquired at a young age with the goldsmith’s tools, for it was in the workshops of craftsmen who incised decorations on objects of precious metal that some of the most interesting early engravings were produced. Thus, the foundation of his achievements as an engraver must be credited to his father.

Apprenticeship and First Journey

By the time Dürer turned 15 years of age he had convinced his father to allow him to become a painter. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter and printer Michael Wolgemut. Even though Wolgemut was not an artist recognized for his great talent, his workshop was widely known. The shop was involved in producing books illustrated with woodcuts. At this time Southern Germany became a center for publishing, and it was commonplace for painters of the period to become skilled at producing woodcuts and engravings. In Wolgemut’s shop Dürer had the opportunity to learn from beginning to end the arts of designing, cutting and printing woodblocks.

Dürer ended his apprenticeship in 1489 after which it was customary for a young man in his position to embark on a bachelor’s journey. This journey was to keep him away from Nuremburg for 4 years. He traveled to Colmar in 1492 where he intended to join the workshop of the great German printmaker Martin Shongauer, but by the time he arrived Shongauer had died. Shongauer’s brothers suggested that he travel on to the Swiss publishing center of Basel to find work. There, and later in Strasbourg, Dürer created illustrations for Saint Jerome’s Epistolare, and Sebastian Brandt’s Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools).

First Italian Journey

In 1494 Dürer returned to Nuremburg where he married Agnes Frey. Shortly afterward he left on his first Italian journey. During the next ten years back in Nuremburg, between 1495 and 1505, Dürer produced a large number of works that firmly established his fame.

Amongst the works produced during this period are the 15 woodblocks, plus title page, illustrating the last book of the New Testament, The Revelations of Saint John the Divine, or The Apocalypse, foretelling the events that would take place on earth at the Second Coming of Christ. Never before had a single artist executed a project of such scope with total mastery of every aspect. The Apocalypse was the first book in history to have been illustrated, printed and published by an artist.

Engravings produced during this period include the “Large Fortune” or “Nemesis” (Strauss 37), and “The Fall of Man” or “Adam & Eve” (S. 42), illustrating Dürer’s mastery of human proportions based on the work of the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius. He was so justly proud of “Adam & Eve” that it is the only print to which he added his full name as signature. Also produced during this period was “Saint Eustace” (S. 34).

Second Italian Journey

Dürer once again traveled to Italy between 1505 and 1507. During this trip he met and studied the paintings of the great Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini, and the engravings of Bellini’s brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, in which Mantegna attempted to capture all the nuances of classical painting. During the visit Dürer also studied the revolutionary ideas of Leonardo da Vinci. He studied the whole intellectual background of the Italian Renaissance including the writings of the humanists. As a result he was able to create his own personal synthesis of the arts of the north and the south.

Upon Dürer’s return to Germany he intensified the learned side of his art and personality; he studied mathematics, geometry, Latin and humanist literature. Having become aware of the superior social status of artists in Italy, he returned to Germany and sought out the company of the leading scholars and humanists including Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus. In 1512 Dürer was appointed court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, a post that included a yearly stipend.

Back in Nuremburg in 1507 Dürer began his second period of great productivity during which he produced a small number of great paintings and many great prints. In 1511 he published the 12 woodcuts comprising The Large Passion, the 17 woodcuts comprising The Life of the Virgin, and 36 woodcuts comprising The Small Passion. Engravings include 15 plates comprising the Engraved Passion, and the monumental single plates “Knight, Death and Devil” (S. 71), “Saint Jerome in His Study” (S. 77), and “Melancholia I” (S. 79).

Final Journey and Late Works

Between 1520 and 1521, laden down with prints and other artworks which he sold along the way to finance his trip, Dürer traveled from Nuremburg to Aachen in order to gain an audience with Charles V, the successor to Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor, from whom his post and pension as court painter was ratified. He traveled from there to Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, Middleburg, Bruges and Ghent keeping a diary along the way which provides a fascinating account of his travels, his audiences with royalty, and his reception by fellow artists.

Dürer’s final monumental works are two large panel paintings depicting “The Four Apostles,” which were presented as his gift to the city of Nuremburg.

Dürer finally returned to Nuremburg in July of 1521, after venturing off to the swamps of Zeeland in search of a beached whale. He remained in Nuremburg where he worked unremittingly, in spite of ill health from fever probably contracted in Zeeland, until his death in 1528.

The quality of Dürer’s work his prodigious output, and his influence on his contemporaries, all underscore the importance of his position in the history of art. Despite his large workshop he had no clear successors, as his art was too universal and yet too personal to breed imitators. Approximately 60 of his paintings survive and are featured in select museums; however, his prints are included in virtually every major print room in the world!

1511. Original engraving. A fine 16th century Meder "c" impression printed c. 1560-1570. Signed in the plate with the artist's monogram on a tablet lower left, dated on a tablet upper center. 6 3/16 x 4 1/4".

Madonna Crowned by One Angel.

1520. Original engraving. Dated and signed with the artist's monogram in the plate. 16th Century Meder "a" impression. 5 3/8 x 3 7/8".

Madonna by the Wall.

1514. Original engraving. Dated and signed in the plate with the artist's monogram on a tablet at the center of the right edge. A good, clean 16th century impression of Meder's second and final state. 5 13/16 x 3 15/16".

Madonna and Child with the Monkey.

c. 1498. Original engraving. Signed in the plate with the artist's monogram lower center. 16th century impression. 7 1/2 x 4 7/8".

1513. Original engraving. Dated and signed in the plate with the artist's monogram on a tablet lower center. 16th Century impression. 3 15/16 x 5 1/2".

Birth of the Virgin.

c. 1503-04. Original woodcut. Signed in the block with the artist's monogram. 16th Century/ lifetime impression. From the edition of 1511, with Latin letterpress on verso. One of 20 woodcuts issued in the album The Life of the Virgin. 11 13/16 x 8 5/16".

Glorification of the Virgin.

c. 1502. Original woodcut. Signed in the block with the artist's monogram. 16th Century/ lifetime impression. From the Latin edition of 1511, without the letterpress text on the verso. The 20th and final woodcut issued in the album The Life of the Virgin. 11 11/16 x 8 1/4".

The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.

1503-04. Original woodcut. Signed in the block with the artist's monogram on a tablet lower right. 16th century impression printed circa 1590. 11 7/8 x 8 7/16".

Alan Flattmann.

(1946-)

Over a career span of more than forty years, New Orleans native, Alan Flattmann has become recognized as one of the most influential and respected pastel artists in the country. Although accomplished in oil and watercolor, Flattmann is best known for his work in pastel. In 2006, the Pastel Society of America honored Flattmann with induction into the prestigious PSA's Hall of Fame. In 2007, he was inducted into the Master Circle of the International Association of Pastel Societies. Flattmann's work can be found in hundreds of private collections and in prominent public collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Longview Museum of Art, Mississippi Museum of Art and the Hang Mingshi Pastel Art Museum in Suzhou, China. His book, The Art of Pastel Painting (Pelican Publishing Co. 2007) is still considered to be the definitive guide to pastel painting. He is also the subject of three other books, The Poetic Realism of Alan Flattmann (ACM Publishing 1981), Alan Flattmann's French Quarter Impressions (Pelican Publishing 2002) and An Artist's Vision of New Orleans: The Paintings of Alan Flattmann (Pelican Publishing 2014).

Evening Reflections in the French Market.

Original pastel. 24 x 30". SOLD.

Orange Shades.

Original pastel. 18 x 24".

Italian Barrel at Night.

Original pastel. 20 x 16".

Lucca Amphitheatre, Tuscany.

Original pastel 24 x 30".

Night Patrol.

Original pastel. 24 x 36".

Rethymonon Harbor with Red.

Crail Scotland Fishing Boats.

Original pastel 14 x 18".

China Tong Li Village.

Original pastel. 15 x 21".

French Farmhouse in Lot Valley.

Original pastel 15 x 21".

Afternoon on St. Peter Street.

Original pastel. 18 x 24".

River Tugboats at Daybreak.

Original Pastel. 18 x 24".

Blustery Afternoon in New Orleans

Original pastel. 24 x 48".

Mena's Palace.

Original watercolor. 13 1/2 x 11 1/2".

Rainy Day, Tuscany Village.

Original watercolor. 13 1/2 x 11 1/2".

Lucca Ampitheatre, Tuscany.

Original watercolor. 11 1/2 x 13 1/2".

Sam Francis.

(1923 - 1994)

One of the twentieth century’s most profound Abstract Expressionists, American artist Sam Francis is noted as one of the first post-World War II painters to develop an international reputation. Francis created thousands of paintings as well as works on paper, prints and monotypes, housed in major museum collections and institutions around the world. Regarded as one of the leading interpreters of color and light, his work holds references to New York abstract expressionism, color field painting, Chinese and Japanese art, French impressionism and his own Bay Area roots.

After graduating from Cal Berkeley in 1950 with a degree in art, Francis moved to Paris, where he would go on to be named by Time Magazine as, “the hottest American painter in Paris these days.” A transformative period of his career, Francis immersed himself in a study of Monet’s Water Lilies and was influenced by his close friendships with the Matisse family and artists Al Held, Joan Mitchell, and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

For the next four decades he traveled and studied extensively, maintaining studios in Bern, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, New York and Northern and Southern California. Through his travels he was exposed to many styles, techniques and cultural influences, which informed the development of his own dialogue and style of painting. Francis possessed a lyrical and gestural hand, enabling him to capture and record the brilliance, energy and intensity of color at different moments of time and periods of his life. His paintings embody his love of literature, music and science, while reflecting his deep range of emotions and personal turmoil.

Not only are Francis’s paintings valued historically for their aesthetic vision, but his inquisitive mind and spirit have solidified Francis’s legacy as a contemporary renaissance man. His interest in the creative process was expansive and synergistic – art, technology, psychology, science, medicine, and protecting the environment (before it became a movement). He was an early investor in research to find creative solutions to our dependence on non-renewable energy sources and cures for AIDs. In each of these realms, he explored the nature of creativity – what stimulates it, the importance of testing new ideas through experimentation as well as the roles of imagination, intuition and knowledge.

Much like Francis believed his life was a series of ongoing challenges, the Sam Francis Foundation is dedicated to expanding his sense of wonder – his freedom to explore – his mantra to dream – his life force to be creative..

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow.

Frankenthaler, daughter of New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler and his wife, Martha (Lowenstein) Frankenthaler, was born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, where she was a student of Paul Feeley, following which she studied briefly with Hans Hofmann.

Frankenthaler’s professional exhibition career began in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected her painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition titled Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and she was also included that year in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture. Renowned art critic Clement Greenberg recognized her originality, and as early as 1959 she began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions. She had her first museum retrospective in 1960, at The Jewish Museum in New York City.

In 1952 Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea, a seminal, breakthrough painting of American abstraction. Pioneering the “stain” painting technique, she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. Mountains and Sea was immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color Field school of painting, notable among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Thereafter, Frankenthaler remained a defining force in the development of American painting.

Throughout her long career, Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly, and, in addition to unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking. Hers was a significant voice in the mid-century “print renaissance” among American abstract painters, and she is particularly renowned for her woodcuts. She continued working productively through the opening years of this century.

Frankenthaler’s distinguished and prolific career has been the subject of numerous monographic museum exhibitions, including—in addition to the 1960 Jewish Museum show—major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and European tour (1969); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and tour (1985, works on paper); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and tour, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989); the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and tour (1993, prints); the Naples Museum of Art, Florida, and tour, including the Yale University Art Gallery (2002, woodcuts); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, traveled to the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2003, works on paper).

In addition to numerous scholarly articles on her work by renowned art historians, curators, and critics, Frankenthaler was the subject of three major monographs: Frankenthaler, by Barbara Rose (1972); Frankenthaler, by John Elderfield (1989); and Frankenthaler: A Catalogue Raisonné, Prints 1961–1994, by Suzanne Boorsch and Pegram Harrison (1996); and substantial exhibition catalogues by authors including Carl Belz, Julia Brown, E.A. Carmean, Jr., Bonnie Clearwater, Ruth Fine, Judith Goldman, Eugene C. Goossen, Frank O’Hara, and Karen Wilkin.

In 2015 Gagosian Gallery published “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler, edited by art historian and curator Katy Siegel, which explores Frankenthaler’s painting and expands its focus to include the immediate social and artistic context of her work, then traces artistic currents as they move outward in different directions in the ensuing decades. Distributed by Rizzoli International Publications, the book collects six scholarly essays, six short texts from contemporary artists, and reprints of historical writing.

Frankenthaler was the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, honors, and awards. In 1966, along with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski, she represented the U.S. at the 33rd Venice Biennale. She received the National Medal of Arts in 2001; served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992; was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1974–2011), where she served as Vice-Chancellor in 1991; and was appointed an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2011.

Important works by Frankenthaler may be found in major museums worldwide.

1989. Original micrograph. Hand signed and dated. From the edition of 45. 32 x 54”. SOLD.

Paul Gauguin

(1848 - 1903)

Paul Gauguin styled himself and his art as "savage." Although he began his artistic career with the Impressionists in Paris, during the late 1880s he fled farther and farther from urban civilization in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, "primitive" art. Yet his self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin cultivated and inhabited a dual image of himself as, on the one hand, a wolfish wild man and on the other, a sensitive martyr for art. His notoriety helped to promote his astonishing work, which freed color from mimetic representation and distorted form for expressive purposes. Gauguin pioneered the Symbolist Art Movement in France and set the stage for Fauvism and Expressionism.

Gauguin came late to art. There is little in his early life to presage his phenomenal artistic career; however, his peripatetic upbringing established his restless need for voyage to exotic destinations. Descended on his mother's side from Peruvian nobility, he spent his early childhood in Lima. He would later misrepresent his ancestry to portray himself as an Incan savage. Gauguin's nomadic life continued when he joined the merchant marines and visited ports as far flung as India and the Black Sea. By 1873, he was married and settled in Paris as a stockbroker, thanks to his guardian Gustave Arosa, a wealthy Spanish financier in Paris with a formidable collection of modern French painting. Through Arosa, Gauguin developed an amateur interest in art. He met Camille Pissarro at Arosa's home and by 1879 became an unofficial pupil as well as patron of the artist. Pissarro soon invited the ambitious Gauguin to exhibit with the Impressionists.

After the stock market crashed in 1882, Gauguin decided to become a full-time artist. He painted Impressionist landscapes, still lifes, and interiors heavily influenced not only by Pissarro but also by Paul Cezanne, whom he had met through Pissarro. Gauguin adopted and adapted Cézanne's parallel, constructive brushstrokes; he in fact bought several paintings by Cézanne in order to study the brushwork more carefully. Nevertheless, Gauguin's pictures showed a preoccupation with dreams, mystery, and evocative symbols that revealed his own artistic inclinations. He also sculpted, carved wood reliefs and objects, and made ceramics, signaling an interest in three-dimensional decorative objects from the beginning of his career.

He eventually set sail for Tahiti in 1891. His first major Tahitian canvas, Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), dresses a Christian theme in Polynesian guise. A Tahitian Virgin Mary is worshipped by two other Tahitian women dressed in colorful pareus in a lush, tropical landscape. The composition is based on a photograph that Gauguin had brought with him of a bas-relief in the Javanese temple of Borobudur. Another photograph that Gauguin packed, of Manet's Olympia , inspired the master work from his first Tahitian trip, Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). Gauguin's Tahitian pictures are thus a hybrid of various Western and Eastern sources, creating a new synthetic style that combined decorative abstract patterning with figuration. In The Siesta, to take a further example, Gauguin updates the fête galante genre as a languorous scene of Tahitian women relaxing on a porch in the humid tropical heat.

After he returned to Paris in 1893, he began creating a book accompanied by woodcuts, entitled Noa Noa (Fragrant), to explain and contextualize the bizarre paintings he had made in Tahiti. The intentionally crude, richly textured woodcuts reconfigured motifs from his paintings to evoke an atmosphere and a vision of Tahiti as mysterious, erotic, and savage. Gauguin experimented with various colored papers, inks, and processes such as offset printing to explore different artistic and emotional effects.

With financial success continuing to elude him in France, Gauguin decided to return to Tahiti permanently in 1895. He was suffering from syphilis by this time, yet between hospitalizations, he was able to paint his masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). This monumental allegorical painting served as a synthesis or culmination of his art. Afterwards, his Tahitian work became increasingly self-referential; he drew and painted the same figures over and over again, cutting and pasting them in different configurations and settings. For instance, the young women in Two Tahitian Women appear in two other monumental paintings in 1898 and 1899.

Despite the arcadian content of his pictures, Gauguin became disillusioned with the Westernization and colonial corruption of Tahiti. He left in 1901 for the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa, perpetually searching for a lost paradise. He died there in 1903, having become a legend for a new generation of artists halfway across the world in Paris.

Nave Nave Fenua.

Original woodcut. 1893-94. Signed in the block with the artist's monogram lower left PGO. From the edition of 100. 14 x 8". SOLD.

Noa Noa.

Original woodcut. 1893-94. Signed in the block with the artist's monogram upper center PGO. From the edition of 100. 14 x 8". SOLD.

Pastorales Martinique.

1889. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone. From the 1900 edition of 50 issued by Ambroise Vollard. From the Vulpine Suite. 14 1/2 x 13".

Alberto Giacometti.

Giacometti was born into a Swiss family of artists. His early work was informed by Surrealism and Cubism, but in 1947 he settled into producing the kind of expressionist sculpture for which he is best known. His characteristic figures are extremely thin and attenuated, stretched vertically until they are mere wisps of the human form. Almost without volume or mass (although anchored with swollen, oversize feet), these skeletal forms appear weightless and remote. Their eerie otherworldliness is accentuated by the matte shades of gray and beige paint, sometimes accented with touches of pink or blue, that the artist applied over the brown patina of the metal. The rough, eroded, heavily worked surfaces of "Three Men Walking (II)" typify his technique. Reduced, as they are, to their very core, these figures evoke lone trees in winter that have lost their foliage. Within this style, Giacometti would rarely deviate from the three themes that preoccupied him—the walking man; the standing, nude woman; and the bust—or all three, combined in various groupings.

Giacometti's work can be seen to balance the concerns of the modern and the historical as well as the specific and the universal. While many have viewed his sculptures as emblematic of the horrors of World War II or representative of the alienation of modern urban life, his figures also contain specific allusions to ancient Egyptian burial figures and to early Greek korai. At the same time, the fragile figures are universalized, their tentative movements expressive of an essential human condition. In this work, the figures take wide steps, each in a different direction. The empty space around them acts as an obstacle to communication. They stride along, each untouched by another, alienated by the void that surrounds them.

Giacometti produced his first prints – wood etchings – alongside his father when he was still a schoolboy. During his life, Giacometti tried his hand at every print technique: wood, engraving, etching, aquatint, and above all, lithography, from 1949 onward. As a witness at André Breton’s wedding in 1934, he illustrated the anthology offered by the poet to his young wife, L’Air de l’eau. Giacometti, who was a great book lover and friend of many writers and poets, also illustrated the writings of René Crevel (Les Pieds dans le Plat, 1933), Georges Bataille (Histoire de rats, 1947), Michel Leiris (Vivantes cendres, innommées, 1961), and René Char (Retour Amont, 1965). From 1951 onward, he produced lithographic plates which were separately published by the Maeght Gallery. Giacometti was always in favour of disseminating his work through quality editions. Lithography involving the transfer of a drawing onto a zinc plate offered the advantage of requiring lightweight equipment that was easy to handle: special paper and a lithographic pencil.The artist was thus able to leave his studio, go out into the street and sketch his city, café terraces, the overhead Metro, modern building sites like Orly airport, and the lithographer’s print shop, and then return to his studio. This would be the subject of Paris sans fin, a collection of 150 prints commissioned by the publisher Tériade, on which Giacometti worked from 1959 on, but which was not published until after his premature death.

Annette de Face.

1955. Original etching. 14 3/4 x 19 15/16"

Claudia Henriquez-Johnson.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965. He first came to public attention in 1988 when he conceived and curated ‘Freeze’, an exhibition of his own work and that of his contemporaries at Goldsmiths college, staged in a disused London warehouse. Since this time Hirst has become widely recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.

Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.

Hirst developed his interest in exploring the “unacceptable idea” of death as a teenager in Leeds. From the age of sixteen, he made regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings (‘With Dead Head’ (1991)). The experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years' (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.”

At Goldsmiths, Hirst’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed significantly, and he began work on some of his most important series. The ‘Medicine Cabinets’ created in his second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Hirst’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.” This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘Pharmacy’ (1992).

Whilst in his second year, Hirst conceived and curated ‘Freeze'– a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of Goldsmiths students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists. For its final phase he painted two series of coloured spots on to the warehouse walls. Hirst describes the spot paintings as a means of “pinning down the joy of colour”, and explains they provided a solution to all problems he’d previously had with colour. It has become one of the artist’s most prolific and recognisable series, and in January 2012 the works were exhibited in a show of unprecedented scale across eleven Gagosian Gallery locations worldwide.

In 1991 Hirst began work on 'Natural History’, arguably his most famous series. Through preserving creatures in minimalist steel and glass tanks filled with formaldehyde solution, he intended to create a “zoo of dead animals”. In 1992, the shark piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) was unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery’s 'Young British Artists I’ exhibition. The shark, described by the artist as a “thing to describe a feeling”, remains one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and popular culture in the 90’s. The series typifies Hirst’s interest in display mechanisms. The glass boxes he employs both in ‘Natural History’ works and in vitrines, such as 'The Acquired Inability to Escape’ (1991), act to define the artwork’s space, whilst simultaneously commenting on the “fragility of existence”.

Since his involvement in ‘Freeze’ in 1988, curatorial projects have remained important to the artist. In 1994 he organised the international group exhibition ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’ at the Serpentine Gallery. Over a decade later, and explaining that he considers collections to constitute a “map of a man’s life”, he curated an award-winning exhibition of work from his ‘Murderme’ collection: 'In the Darkest Hour There May be Light'. (2006, Serpentine Gallery).

Stating: “I am absolutely not interested in tying things down”, Hirst has continued over the last decade to explore the “big issues” of “death, life, religion, beauty, science.” In 2007, he unveiled the spectacular, 'For the Love of God' (2007): a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, at the White Cube exhibition 'Beyond Belief'. The following year, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement in selling 244 new works at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Describing the sale as a means of democratising the art market, the ‘Beautiful Inside my Head Forever' auction followed Hirst’s Sotheby’s event in 2004, in which the entire contents of the artist’s restaurant venture, Pharmacy, were sold.

Since 1987, over 80 solo Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide and his work has been included in over 260 group shows. Hirst’s first major retrospective 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' was held in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2004. His contribution toBritish art over the last two and a half decades was recognised in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work staged at Tate Modern.

Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon.

Gold Thioglucose.

2008. Original screen print in 48 colors with gold leaf. Hand signed in pencil lower right. From the edition of 45. 29 1/2 x 37 1/4”.

David Hockney.

Robert Indiana.

LOVE.

Sold.

Michael Kahn

Internationally renowned photographer Michael Kahn’s stunning seascape and spectacular sailing photographs are exhibited in art galleries and museums throughout the world. Michael’s handmade photographs are each signed and created in limited editions. With his 1950’s camera, Michael travels extensively to photograph the world’s finest boats and pristine seascapes. He collects his images on traditional black and white film and produces luminous silver gelatin prints in his darkroom. His traditional technique united with his distinctive sense of form, vision, and composition has helped him to become one of the most memorable photographers of our time.

Born in 1960, Michael Kahn is a life-long resident of Chester County Pennsylvania. During his childhood, his family summered on the coasts of Maine and Topsail Island, North Carolina. This is where his love of the sea and sailing originated. After high school, Michael apprenticed in a portrait studio where they used Hasselblad cameras with a square 6x6 cm film format. Here, Michael received hands on training in film handling and black and white printmaking. Several years later, the owner of the studio changed the business model and became a commercial/advertising photographer. Michael stayed on as an assistant, learning skills in advertising, product and editorial photography. From there, Michael branched off on his own, shooting for magazines and other commercial clients. In 1990 he published a book of black and white photographs of the Brandywine River in Southeastern Pennsylvania. In the mid-90’s, Michael took his first sailing photograph of a small boat in the fog on a lake in the Adirondacks. This image launched his nautical photography career. Michael made the decision to stay with his film cameras instead of going with the new trends in digital equipment, and continues to make handmade photographs in his darkroom.

His work has been exhibited in over 50 solo and group gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the United States, Switzerland, Scotland, France, Bahrain and Nepal. Books published on the work of Michael Kahn include Over the Dunes (2015), The Spirit of Sailing (2004), and Brandywine (1990).

Michael's work has appeared in countless publications, among them: Conde Nast Traveller, Elle Decor, Coastal Living, Forbes, Sailing Magazine, Photo Technik International (Germany), Classic Yacht, the New York Times, Town & Country, Architectural Digest, and many others.

Maitres de l'Affiche.

Les Maitres de l'Affiche (The Masters of the Poster) is one of the most prestigious and influential art publications in history. Its 256 color plates from the turn of the century were issued as separate numbered sheets measuring 11 1/4 x 15 1/2" every month for 60 consecutive months. From December 1895 through November 1900, subscribers received a wrapper containing four consecutively numbered poster lithographic works. On 16 occasions, the monthly wrapper also contained a bonus plate, not a poster reproduction, but a specially created art lithograph. Jules Cheret, artistic director of Imprimerie Chaix and father of the modern poster, emerged with the majority of the plates, one of every 4 issued per month, and seven of the 16 bonus plates. Of the 97 artists represented in Les Maitres de l'Affiche, some were preeminent painters and printmakers at various stages of their careers, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard among them. There were also those artists whose names say "poster", the pioneers of the new medium such as Cheret himself, Mucha, Steinlen, the Beggarstaffs, Grasset, and Parrish.

Henri Matisse.

(1869-1954)

Along with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse was regarded as one of the greatest figures in 20th-century art, a master of color and form, and the leader of the group of artists known as the Fauves. Unlike many artists, he was internationally popular during his lifetime and enjoyed the favor of collectors, art critics, and the younger generation of artists who followed him.

In 1892, having given up a career in law, Matisse went to Paris to study art formally. His teachers were academically trained and relatively conservative in style, but Matisse also studied more contemporary art, especially that of the Impressionists. Matisse's true artistic liberation, in terms of using color to render forms and organize spatial planes, came through the influence Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. Then, in 1903 and 1904, Matisse encountered the pointillist paintings of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac. Cross and Signac were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes (often dots or “points”) of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. Matisse adopted their technique and modified them repeatedly, usually using broader strokes. He also embarked upon an exploration of printmaking, with an emphasis on linocuts, lithography and etching, that would propel his creativity into other media.

By 1905, Matisse had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, and exhibited his paintings along with works by Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together, the group was dubbed les fauves (literally, “the wild beasts”) because of the extreme emotionalism in which they seemed to have indulged, their use of vivid colors, and their distortion of shapes.

Although intellectually sophisticated, Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate their own relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design.

"Creativity takes courage." - Henri Matisse

L'Enterrement de Pierrot.

1947. Original pochoir after Matisse's cut paper collage maquette of the same title. From the edition of 250. One of 20 pochoirs illustrating the artist's own text in the book, JAZZ. 16 1/2 x 25 3/4".

La Cage de Perruches.

1929. Original copper plate used in the etching of the same title. Etching published in an edition of 25. Inscribed signature in the plate lower center.

1929 Original copperplate from which the edition of 25 was printed. Impressions from this plate are housed in the permanent collections of MOMA (New York), Musee Matisse (Nice) and Biblioteque Nationale (Paris). SOLD.

1944. Original linocut. From the edition of 200 on this paper illustrating the Henry de Montherlant text Pasiphae: Chant de Minos. 12 7/8 x 9 13/16".

Joan Miro.

(1893-1983)

Joan Miró, one of the leading artists of the 20th century, was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1893. At the time of his death in Palma de Mallorca in 1983, he had left behind an extraordinary legacy that is acknowledged as among the greatest of his time. His work, in general, would be marked with a clear surrealist tendency, where the realm of the memory and imaginative fantasy were to take priority.

He studied at La Lonja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and in 1918 set up his first individual exhibition in the Dalmau Galleries, in the same city. His works before 1920 (the date of his first trip to Paris) reflect the influence of different trends, like the pure and brilliant colors used in Fauvism, shapes taken from cubism, influences from folkloric Catalan art and Roman frescos from the churches.

His trip to Paris introduced him to and developed his trend of surrealist painting. In 1921, he showed his first individual exhibition in Paris at La Licorne Gallery. In 1928, he exhibited with a group of Surrealists in the Pierre Gallery, also in Paris, although Miró was always to maintain his independent qualities with respect to groups and ideologies.

From 1929-1930, Miró began exploring collage, which would eventually lead to his fascination with the creation of surrealist sculptures. His tormented monsters appeared during this decade, which gave way to the consolidation of his plastic vocabulary. He also experimented with many other forms, such as engraving, lithography and other types of original prints, as well as watercolors, pastels, and painting over copper. Of particular importance during this period were the two ceramic murals which he made for the UNESCO building in Paris (The Wall of the Moon and the Wall of the Sun, 1957-59).

During his later years, Miro's creativity was undiminished as he concentrated more and more on monumental and public works. These works were characterized by the same freshness and playful ingenuity with which he carried out his canvasses, while paying special attention to the qualities of the new materials he employed. He focused primarily on symbols in his creations, more than specific themes or narratives, thus creating works with strong ties to the collective unconscious.

In 1976 the Joan Miró Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art Study opened in the city of Barcelona, and in 1979, just four years before his death, he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona.

1969. Original etching, aquatint, and carborundum printed in colors on wove paper bearing the "ARCHES/ FRANCE" watermark. Hand signed in pencil lower right Miro. From the edition of 75. 39 3/4 x 27 5/8".

L'Ogre Enjoué.

1969. Original etching, aquatint, and carborundum. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 75. 36 3/4 x 55 3/8”.

Le Chef des Equipages.

1973. Original etching, aquatint and carborundum. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 50. 54 1/4 23 5/8".

Robert Motherwell.

American (1915 - 1991)

Possessing perhaps the best and most extensive formal education of all the New York School painters, Robert Motherwell was well versed in literature, philosophy and the European modernist traditions. His paintings, prints and collages feature simple shapes, bold color contrasts and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes. They reflect not only a dialogue with art history, philosophy and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression and revolution.

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, but he would spend much of his childhood in the dry environs of central California, where he was sent in an effort to relieve his severe asthma. The son of a well-to-do and conservative bank chairman, Motherwell was expected to follow in his father's footsteps. From early on, though, Motherwell displayed an affinity for more intellectual and creative pursuits, and his early education included a scholarship to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

Before he devoted himself entirely to art practice, Motherwell received an extensive education in philosophy, literature and art history. He began his studies at Stanford University, where he earned a BA in philosophy in 1937. There he encountered the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the work of French symbolist poets, and these twin inspirations helped to open Motherwell's mind to the possibilities of abstraction in writing and art interrupted by a yearlong European trip which he embarked upon in 1938, and during which he fell in love with European modernism. It was only at his father's insistence that he chose a stable occupation which led him to study art history at Columbia University in 1940, instead of immediately beginning his career as an artist. Motherwell's time at Columbia, however, proved to be significant for his artistic development. Upon his arrival to New York, he fell in with the circle of painters who would make up the core of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Another powerful influence was art historian Meyer Schapiro, who was then teaching at Columbia. Schapiro encouraged Motherwell's painting and introduced him to the group of European Surrealists living in New York at the time. He was deeply impressed by their notion of automatism - the idea that art might be a manifestation of the artist's subconscious - and it would become a central tenet of his work.

Motherwell's first known works were composed during a 1941 trip to Mexico with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. These eleven pen and ink drawings, collectively called the "Mexican Sketchbook," show the influence of Surrealism, yet they are essentially abstract in nature and balance formal composition with spontaneous invention. Motherwell's career then received a jump-start in 1943 when Peggy Guggenheim offered him the opportunity to create new work for a show of collages by several European modernists. He took to collage immediately and would continue to utilize the technique throughout his career. The pieces included in the show featured a mixture of torn paper, expressively applied paint, and violent themes relating to the Second World War. The show proved successful for Motherwell, and it was followed by a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1944, and a contract with the dealer Sam Kootz in 1945.

n the 1940s, Motherwell also began parallel careers in teaching, editing and writing. Over the next two decades, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; he helped to establish an art school, Subjects of the Artist, in New York's Greenwich Village; and he also taught at Hunter College. He wrote for the Surrealist publication VVV in 1941, and later edited the extremely influential Documents of Modern Art series, the publication Possibilities, and The Dada Painters and Poets anthology. He would continue to lecture and write about art throughout his long career.

The Elegies to the Spanish Republic series - the career-spanning group of over 140 works for which the artist is perhaps best known - began as a small drawing created in 1948 to accompany a poem in Possibilities. A year later, Motherwell reworked the sketch as a painting called At Five in the Afternoon, so named for a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a poet who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. The Elegies paintings use the tragedy of the war as a metaphor for all human suffering; and with their stark black and white palette, gestural brushwork, and tense relationships between ovoid and rectilinear forms, they also attempt to symbolically represent the human cycles of life, death, oppression and resistance.

Composed between 1953-1957, the artist's second major group of work is called the Je t'aimeseries, after the French phrase that appears on each canvas. These works feature a brighter and broader palette than the Elegies paintings, yet they maintain the same dialogue between the strictly formal compositions of European modernism and the more spontaneous, emotionally expressive methods of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

In 1961, Motherwell began to reinvent his collages as limited editions of lithographic prints. He would become the only artist in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists to utilize printmaking as a major part of his artistic practice. Motherwell's collages from this period also started to incorporate the detritus (cigarette wrappers, etc.) of his daily life. These autobiographical references hint again at the artist's interest not only in formal and intellectual concerns, but also his continued engagement with the external world and his own emotions.

Motherwell began his third major series, the Opens, in 1968, after the dissolution of his marriage to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. As with his earlier series, these works are organized around a relatively simple formal construct - in this case, a two or three-sided rectilinear box on a mostly monochromatic field - in which Motherwell would find almost infinite room for variation and extrapolation.

Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement, whose lives and careers burned brightly but for far too short a time, Motherwell would continue to work productively throughout the next thirty years. He spent these years painting, printmaking, lecturing and further expanding upon the themes that had occupied his entire life. After a long and prolific career, the artist died in 1991 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Black for Mozart.

1991. Original lithograph. Hand signed with the artist’s monogram in pencil. Artist’s proof impression, one of 16 such impressions. 63 3/4 x 40 1/2”.

Alphonse Mucha.

(1860- 1939)

Alphonse Mucha was an extremely influential artist whose name will always be most associated with the Art Nouveau movement. His graphic designs, and in particular his large posters, came to epitomize the very embodiment of this style.

Mucha was born in Ivancice, Moravia in the Czech Republic. Under the patronage of Count Khuen-Belassi, a wealthy landowner who first commissioned Mucha to paint murals in his castle, Mucha studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After two years in Munich, he was sent to study at the Academie Julian in Paris. After a couple of years the supporting funds were discontinued and Mucha was to become the proverbial starving artist. He was 27 years old with no money and no prospects.

For approximately five years he struggled to make ends meet, working in illustration for popular magazines and borrowing money. He shared a studio with Gauguin for a short period of time. Mucha gave impromptu art lessons. All the while he was formulating his own theories and precepts of what he wanted his art to be. In December of 1894 he was given an opportunity that would change his life. During the Christmas holidays, he was called upon to create a poster for Sarah Bernhardt’s play Gismonda. The poster, which appeared on January 1, 1895 was the declaration of his new art. This near life-size design was a sensation not only with Miss Bernhardt, but also the adoring public. Its success made Mucha a celebrity. Miss Bernhardt contracted him to do her posters, costumes and sets for her plays for close to a decade.

Commissions poured in. In 1898 he moved to a new studio, had his first one-man show and began publishing graphics with Champenois. For the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, Mucha designed the Bosnia-Hercegovina Pavilion. He partnered with the goldsmith Georges Fouquet to create jewelry based on his designs. He also published Documents Decoratifs, a visual statement of his artistic theories. This portfolio, which contains 72 plates, was used for years by many art schools as a textbook, and it influenced a whole generation of artists.

His association with Miss Bernhardt led to an entry into social circles where he was introduced to Charles Crane, a millionaire from Chicago. In 1909 Crane provided financing for a project that Mucha considered his life’s ambition, “The Slav Epic”. Covering the history of the Slavic people up to the nineteenth century, twenty massive paintings (approximately 24 x 40 feet) chronicling major events in the Slav nation were presented to the city of Prague in 1928.

Mucha created a style based on strong compositions, sensuous curves derived from nature refined decorative elements and natural colors. His Gismonda poster set the standard for a great number of his future posters. There are two zones of text on the upper and lower sections that are countered balanced by the solitary figure. There is an eloquent, expressive gesture filling the center. The drapery intertwines with the text at the bottom. Reality and stylization are integrated throughout the entire composition.

The four most conspicuous elements in Mucha’s posters are best represented in one of his poster for Job cigarette papers. First, women are seen as idealized beauty. Nearly all his designs will show women as beautiful and desirable. Repeated in Mucha’s best work is a bordered ring behind the main subject. Mucha saw the circle as the most perfect shape in nature and he utilized as often as possible. The undulating tresses (sometimes referred to as “macaroni”) are used often to adorn and enhance their loveliness. The fourth element is his use of meticulous ornamentation. Mucha makes sure the background of his posters is as carefully crafted as his the main subject.

Mucha’s work today can be found in leading museums and private collections worldwide. His name will always be synonymous with the Art Nouveau movement, and the tremendous demand for his work has created a level of rarity that has outpaced even that of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Moet & Chandon: Grand Cremant Imperial.

1899. Original lithograph. Signed and dated on the stone lower right. 24 1/4 x 9 5/16".

Moet & Chandon: Champagne White Star.

1899. Original lithograph. 23 x 7 3/4".

Salon des Cent.

1896. Original lithograph. Handsigned. 24 3/8 x 16 9/16".

Salon des Cent.

1896. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone. 24 1/2 x 16 1/4".

Biscuits Lefevre-Utile/Gaufrette Vanille.

1896. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone. 23 3/4 x 17 1/8".

Flirt Biscuits.

1899. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone lower right Mucha. Printed by F. Champenois, Paris bearing his credit line at the lower edge. 24 1/8 x 11 3/16".

Tommaso Ottieri

(1971 - ).

Tommaso Ottieri was born in Naples, Italy in 1971. He studied architecture at the University of Naples and the Robert Gordon School of Architecture. After winning the Leonardo da Vinci scholarship in 1996, Ottieri moved to the Greek island of Santorini to work as an architect. During this time, he founded his first painting studio in the town of Oia. After returning to Naples in 1998, he obtained his Master's degree in Executive Planning and Bio-Architecture at the University Federico II of Naples. Shortly after receiving his degree, he devoted himself to painting full time. His study of architecture has undoubtedly shaped the style and subject matter of his paintings- luminous urban landscapes and the interiors of theaters and churches. He focuses on the color, light and movement found in the intense life of a city as it falls into the dark. By using wax and oil as his medium, his paintings have a texture that fills them with the drama and motion seen in the places they depict. Ottieri has enjoyed international success as an artist, exhibiting in over 20 solo exhibitions and nearly 40 group exhibitions in cities all over the world.

"I always paint the city as women I adore, to place them standing in front of a majestic sky and at the sight of a world, which sets but always dawns." - Tommaso Ottieri

New York.

Original oil and wax on panel. 24 x 24”.

Matematica Romana.

Original oil on board. 2017. 63 x 94 1/2".

Seville.

Original oil and wax on panel.

Paris et Blue.

Original oil on board. 2017. 27 1/2 x 39 1/2".

London Bridges.

Original oil and wax on panel.

Pablo Picasso.

(1881-1973)

The greatest painter and most innovative sculptor of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was also its foremost printmaker. His graphic oeuvre spans more than seven decades, from 1899 to 1972. His published prints total approximately 2000 different images pulled from metal, stone, wood, linoleum and celluloid. His unpublished prints, perhaps 200 more, have yet to be exactly counted.

Picasso’s prints demonstrate his intuitive and characteristic ability to recognize and exploit the possibilities inherent in any medium in which he chose to work. Once he had mastered the traditional methods of a print medium, like etching on metal, Picasso usually experimented further, pursuing, for example, scarcely known intaglio techniques such as sugar-lift aquatint.

The printed graphic work of Picasso shows a clearly defined succession of periods in which certain techniques predominated.

Early on, the copperplate, with its variants of the etching and drypoint, fascinated the young artist. In the Parisian ateliers of the masters of this craft, Eugene Delatre, Louis Fort and above all, Roger Lacouriere, he was introduced to many new techniques. Later, Picasso acquired his own press on which he made many trial proofs and further explored the secrets of printmaking.

Between 1919 and 1930 he occasionally turned his hand to lithography. Then, in the etchings of the Vollard series, his creative powers reached a first culminating point. Most of the compositions that followed during the war years were intended for book illustrations.

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Picasso carved his first linoleum cut. The work was the artist’s contribution to the hastily assembled album of poems and prints Pour la Tchecoslovaquie: Homage a un pays martyrpublished to commemorate Czechoslovakian martyrs. Its style is quick and curvilinear. Its violent image, the head of an anguished screaming woman, was printed in black and white. It may be considered Picasso’s final postscript to his mural Guernica (1937), and until 1951 Picasso could look back on some 300 etchings and engravings that he had produced over the previous thirty-five years. His achievement in intaglio had been extraordinary and it alone could assure his pre-eminence in the history of printmaking.

The year 1945 marks the inception of his great lithographic work in the atelier of Fernand Mourlot. It seems almost as though he was now eager to make up for lost time. His growing mastery of the medium and his inventive genius soon enables him to venture into domains new to lithography and to achieve bold and striking effects.

After World War II, Picasso’s production as a printmaker substantially increased and the etching and engraving continued to be his favorite medium for graphic expression. During several concentrated spans of time, however, he was profoundly involved with two other techniques: first lithography on stone, (and its surrogate, zinc) and subsequently, linocut, a relief method of carving and printing similar to woodcut but utilizing a linoleum instead of a wood surface. Picasso adapted the processes of both lithography and linocut to his own language and to his individual methods as a peintre-graveur. His continual inventiveness sometimes challenged his collaborators, the printers, to the limits of their own skills as craftsmen.

Picasso’s prolific and astonishing example in lithography during the late 1940’s and the 1950’s encouraged other principal painters of the Ecole des Paris, including Leger and Miro, to work directly on stone and zinc in association with printers. Two women, Francoise Gilot, a painter and writer Picasso met in 1943, and Jacqualine Roque, whom he met in 1953 (and who would become his second wife in 1961) were the primary sources of inspiration for his lithographic output. In 1951, when Picasso was seventy, he renewed his interest in the art of linocut, an interest which would continue for almost two decades.

In 1963 Piero and Aldo Crommelynck brought a hand press from Paris to Mougins, where the artist had settled permanently. From then on, his etching, drypoint and aquatint would translate into black and white on color compositions of unfailing inspiration.

In his eighties, Picasso actively resumed etching and engraving and about 500 intaglio plated from this period of his career have been published. Finally, in 1972, a year before his death, Picasso etched two intaglio plates, his last prints.

Picasso has astonished the ablest printmakers again and again. It is not only that he mastered the difficulties of new techniques with playful ease; he soon went on to obtain results that had hitherto been deemed impossible. A virtuoso craftsman in engraving, etching, lithography and linocut, he explored their secrets with patience, love, and elicits from each medium the very subtlest effects it is capable of yielding. Picasso cared. It is hardly surprising that five, ten or even thirty states were sometimes necessary before a masterpiece emerged from his hands.

"My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso." - Pablo Picasso

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." - Pablo Picasso

Jacqueline Lisant.

1958. Original lithograph. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 50. 22 x 17 3/8".

Buste au Corsage a Carreaux- Jacqueline.

1957. Original lithograph. Hand signed in red crayon. From the edition of 50. 25 5/8 x 19 7/8". SOLD.

Minotaure Caressant Une Dormeuse.

1933. Original drypoint. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 260, the Vollard Suite.

David et Bethsabee.

1949. Original lithograph. Hand signed in colored pencil in the margin lower right Picasso and dated on the stone "7.4.49". Definitive state. From the edition of 50. Sheet size 30 1/8 x 22 1/4".

Le Cirque, Repetition.

1933. Original drypoint. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 260, the Vollard Suite.

Jacqueline au Bandeau de Face.

1962. Original linocut. Handsigned. 25 1/4 x 20 3/4". Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA, New York.

Baigneuses au Ballon III.

Original drypoint. 1933. One of 3 unsigned and unnumbered proofs apart from the numbered edition of 50 and 16 additional roman numerated artist's proofs. From the ex collection of Marina Picasso, grand daughter of Pablo Picasso. 11 x 7". Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rembrandt.

(1606-1669)

Rembrandt Van Rijn is considered one of the greatest and most influential painters and printmakers of all art history; he stands out as one of the most solitary and unapproachable personalities, who struck his own style and stamped his influence for all posterity. In his etched works, his unique position is realized to even greater advantage than in his painted works; Hardly any etchers, then or since, achieved the same mastery of medium and expression that Rembrandt possessed. In the range of his genius, Rembrandt still stands alone in art history. Whether a landscape, a genre scene, a religious moment, or a still life—he illumined all with his technical and stylistic powers, never failing to pierce to the heart of things.

Born in 1606 as the ninth child of a wealthy miller in the town of Leiden, young Rembrandt attended Latin school until 1620 and studied at the University of Leiden. Even at a young age, his interest and ability in the arts was apparent, and he came to study with local artist Jacobvan Swanenburgh, working for three years to develop his formative abilities. In the early 1620s, Rembrandt spent a precious six months studying with Pieter Lastman, a great artist in Amsterdam. In 1624, the young Rembrandt opened his own studio in Leiden, and he began accepting students in 1627, including Gerard Dou.

As proof of Rembrandt’s individual genius, it is interesting to note that in an age when every young artist made an obligatory trip to Italy, the young Rembrandt did not. As a pupil of the classicist Lastman, he despised the conventional tour. He was convinced that the true realization of his and his country’s art lay in the limited view of the Dutch interior and amid the quiet beauty of uneventful landscape.

After leaving school in the early 1620s, Rembrandt spent several years experimenting with the technique of etching. His earliest undated prints were produced about 1626 and the earliest dated prints were done in 1628. Rembrandt expressed great genius in numerous series of studies, portraits, and Biblical subjects. His etchings numbered more than three hundred and were well received due to the fine detail of the pieces. The execution of the plates was a masterful accomplishment in that time in history.

By 1632, Rembrandt’s reputation was well established. He permanently settled in Amsterdam, and there he received many commissions, allowing him a life of prosperity. In 1634, he married a wealthy woman named Saskia, and for the next ten years, they led a comfortable, happy life of luxury and extravagance, building a family and enjoying the success of Rembrandt’s art. They bought a luxuriously large house in the artistic Jewish Quarter, an indulgence that later contributed to his financial ruin.

Tragedy too soon eclipsed this happy period. In the 1630s, the couple’s first three children died shortly after birth—only their fourth child Titus survived to adulthood. Then, shortly after Titus’s birth, dear wife Saskia died, possibly of tuberculosis. Rembrandt’s drawings of Saskia on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works.

After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt kept other female companions, including Geertje Dircx, who worked as Titus’s nanny, and Hendrickje Stoffels, who began as Remrandt’s maid. Even with small new found joys, Rembrandt could not escape emotional hardship. Soon after birthing a healthy baby girl, Rembrandt’s faithful companion Hendrickje passed away. Then, just after marrying in 1668, Rembrandt’s song Titus and his young wife both died. The artist was once again all but alone.

Throughout his life, Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art (including bidding up his own work), prints (often used in his paintings) and rarities, which probably caused a court arrangement to avoid his bankruptcy in 1656 when he sold most of his paintings and a large collection of antiquities. The sale list survives and gives good insight into his collections, which included Old Master paintings and drawings,

busts of the Roman Emperors, suits of Japanese armor among and assorted Asian objects, and collections of natural history and minerals.

In spite of his personal tragedies, Rembrandt never ceased working, the one constant in his life. As an artist, he made no compromises. Indeed, first and foremost, his life was dedicated to his passion for creating art.

Throughout his whole work, Rembrandt accepted all variations of man, woman, and land that lay to his hand. He never sought the external ideal of beauty, which he felt lacked the distinct voice of true humanity. He appreciated that physical realism is less a hindrance than an aid to the rendering of spiritual significance—both religious and secular—in art.

In his lifetime, Rembrandt created countless self-portraits, like a string of autobiographies that reveal the progression of his physical and emotional states. Still today, he is renowned a master of the self-portrait in both etching and paint.

Rembrandt’s etched work can be divided into three periods, each with a predominant characteristic. In the first period (1628-1639), the pure etched line is the most common medium. The young artist was accustomed to holding back exuberant passion, using careful and even restrained draftsmanship.

By 1640, in the second period, Rembrandt’s work with the dry-point, which began in the late 1630s, became a significant factor in his style, and its use in heightening the effect of light and shade is little by little more adequately realized. Attention to the tone of the whole composition, apart from the mere design, is characteristic of Rembrandt’s developing power, though this end is still gained largely by means of close lines of shading.

In the third period (from 1651 through his death), there is a remarkable increase in the vigor and breadth of the handling. The lines of shading are more open, the forms less conventional, and the touch truer, more spontaneous, and less evidently conscious. Drypoint was used as much as etching, and chiaroscuro, now of-the-moment, was often achieved by a more summary method, though still rendered in some plates by closely hatched shading.

In his etching, Rembrandt is open to adapting all elements of life and art that made a passing impression on his mind, which best displays his constant freshness of vision. Like all the greatest creators, he seldom exhibited a need for forced originality. He used familiar themes and felt no compunction at copying other artists. Yet, his reused themes and ideas show a readiness of appreciation, not poverty of imagination.

His pre-eminent place in art depends as much on his untiring powers of self-education as on any extraordinary brilliance of innate genius. While other artists acquiesced in contemporary fame, public, Rembrandt still took infinite pains to re-explore visual paths, sometimes leading him away from general popularity, but constantly reaching for the highest level of human achievement.

Pierre Auguste Renoir.

1841-1919

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the last of the Impressionists to be drawn into printmaking, turning to the medium when he was almost fifty years old. Though he was extremely skilled as an etcher and lithographer, he spent the majority of his career establishing himself as a painter. Thus, most of the prints we have from him were executed for friends and colleagues or for book frontispieces and illustrations. Although they are limited (Renoir only created about sixty prints in total), his etchings and lithographs posses such merit, that it is truly a cause for regret that the artist did not produce a greater number of them.

As a printmaker, Renoir was greatly indebted to the encouragement and support of two men - Ambroise Vollard, the great Parisian art dealer and the most important print publisher of his time, and Auguste Clot, the master lithographer who printed many of the Vollard editions.

Renoir was not overly theoretical with the content of his work, and instead simply chose to represent what he loved. His work is sensual, but always charming and never threatening. Théodore Duret, an authority on the origins of the Impressionist movement wrote that, “Instead of contriving like Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, or Degas to find a singular point of view or unexpected lighting, Renoir wanted to see and love only what everyone, or almost everyone, sees and loves: a woman, a tree, flowers, childhood, water…”

Renoir’s women are supple and soft, and though their images are rendered in black and white, he is still able to capture the lustrous quality their skin. There is a lyrical quality to Renoir’s prints, and he is unsurpassed in representing a woman’s grace and physical beauty.

Odalisque.

1904. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone below the image lower right Renoir. Proof impression of this rare lithograph, apart from the edition of 75 commissioned to illustrate an unrealized publication of Leo Vanier. 7 516 x 9 3/16".

Gerhard Richter

Norman Rockwell.

Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.—Norman Rockwell

Born in New York City in 1894, Norman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. At age 14, Rockwell enrolled in art classes at The New York School of Art (formerly The Chase School of Art). Two years later, in 1910, he left high school to study art at The National Academy of Design. He soon transferred to The Art Students League, where he studied with Thomas Fogarty and George Bridgman. Fogarty’s instruction in illustration prepared Rockwell for his first commercial commissions. From Bridgman, Rockwell learned the technical skills on which he relied throughout his long career.

Rockwell found success early. He painted his first commission of four Christmas cards before his sixteenth birthday. While still in his teens, he was hired as art director of Boys’ Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, and began a successful freelance career illustrating a variety of young people’s publications.

At age 21, Rockwell’s family moved to New Rochelle, New York, a community whose residents included such famous illustrators as J.C. and Frank Leyendecker and Howard Chandler Christy. There, Rockwell set up a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and produced work for such magazines as Life, Literary Digest, and Country Gentleman. In 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post, the magazine considered by Rockwell to be the “greatest show window in America.” Over the next 47 years, another 321 Rockwell covers would appear on the cover of the Post. Also in 1916, Rockwell married Irene O’Connor; they divorced in 1930.

The 1930s and 1940s are generally considered to be the most fruitful decades of Rockwell’s career. In 1930 he married Mary Barstow, a schoolteacher, and the couple had three sons, Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter. The family moved to Arlington, Vermont, in 1939, and Rockwell’s work began to reflect small-town American life.

In 1943, inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress, Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms paintings. They were reproduced in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post with essays by contemporary writers. Rockwell’s interpretations of Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear proved to be enormously popular. The works toured the United States in an exhibition that was jointly sponsored by the Post and the U.S. Treasury Department and, through the sale of war bonds, raised more than $130 million for the war effort.

Although the Four Freedoms series was a great success, 1943 also brought Rockwell an enormous loss. A fire destroyed his Arlington studio as well as numerous paintings and his collection of historical costumes and props.

In 1953, the Rockwell family moved from Arlington, Vermont, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Six years later, Mary Barstow Rockwell died unexpectedly. In collaboration with his son Thomas, Rockwell published his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, in 1960. The Saturday Evening Post carried excerpts from the best-selling book in eight consecutive issues, with Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait on the cover of the first.

In 1961, Rockwell married Molly Punderson, a retired teacher. Two years later, he ended his 47-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to work for Look magazine. During his 10-year association with Look, Rockwell painted pictures illustrating some of his deepest concerns and interests, including civil rights, America’s war on poverty, and the exploration of space.

In 1973, Rockwell established a trust to preserve his artistic legacy by placing his works in the custodianship of the Old Corner House Stockbridge Historical Society, later to become Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. The trust now forms the core of the Museum’s permanent collections. In 1976, in failing health, Rockwell became concerned about the future of his studio. He arranged to have his studio and its contents added to the trust. In 1977, Rockwell received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2008, Rockwell was named the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, thanks to a dedicated effort from students in Berkshire County, where Rockwell lived for the last 25 years of his life.

Scouts of Many Trails.

1937. Study for Scouts of Many Trails. Original oil on masonite. An intermediate study for a 1937 Boys Life cover illustration. 40 x 28 1/2". SOLD.

Royo.

(1941-)

Born in 1941 in Valencia, Spain, Royo began demonstrating his artistic talent early. At the age of 9 his father, a prominent physician and avid art enthusiast, employed private tutors to instruct Royo in drawing, painting, and sculpture. When Royo turned 14 he entered the San Carlos Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Valencia. Upon turning 18 Royo continued his artistic studies privately with Aldolfo Ferrer Amblat, Chairman of Art Studies at the San Carlos Academy. He also visited the major museums in Europe at this time to study the famous masters-Velasquez, Goya, Renoir, Monet, and Sorolla among others.

During the mid-60's-early 70's Royo added more dimensions to his skills creating theatre sets and doing graphic illustration and restoration work. He also participated in prestigious competitions gaining major distinctions. In 1968 he began to exhibit in Spain, specifically Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona. With positive reception of his works in Madrid, Royo received commissions to paint the royal portraits of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. He received subsequent commissions to paint the Judges of the High Magistrature and the Court of Justice, as well as prominent political and society figures.

At the age of 25 Royo began feeling a growing desire to paint the land of his birth; to convey the light, the color and the intensity of Valencia and the Mediterranean. This meant a new focus and change of style in his work; he needed to perfect new ways to capture the light, the shadow and to work on classical composition styles. Through the 1980's Royo perfected his style of painting the Mediterranean and exhibited abroad, notably in London, Brussels, Copenhagen and Paris. He also participated in the International Geneva Art Fair.

Beginning in 1989 and continuing until today we see the development of Royo's "matured" style. His dramatic use of color and "texturing" capture his subject matter with unique flair. Parallels can be drawn to the work of the European masters; for example, with Royo's "homage to the female form," we see the distinct influence of Renoir. It is the similar, almost portrait-like treatment of the female model, caught in a serene, contemplative moment, with the surrounding "bursts" of color from the floral landscapes where we see the "Renoir" in Royo's work. In fact, critics have concluded, "If the artwork of Renoir were blended with that of the 'Valencian painters' you would arrive at the canvasses approaching the uniqueness of the impressive work of Royo."

Impressive parallels can also be drawn between Royo's work and that of the Spanish master, Joaquin Sorolla. Both were born in Valencia, both were classically trained, both "matured" into styles of painting capturing the dramatic visual essence of their homeland-Valencia and the Mediterranean Sea. They have both been described as "painters of the Light"; some have said, "of the Light of the South," that is, the southern coast of Spain. It is the overwhelming influence of Sorolla blended with his own style that make Royo's masterful treatment of the Mediterranean subjects both haunting and mysterious, yet full of raw power at the same time. The sweeping brush strokes, bold swaths of color, and heavy impasto capture the eye and draws one inward until that final absolute moment of awareness that one is actually there in the scene feeling the light and heat of the sun, the salt and sea spray, and hearing the crashing surf. Royo conveys not merely image, but mood and atmosphere as well. This is rare in today's art world, hence the connoisseur is compelled to compare with the old masters. Thus, the appeal of Royo's work for today's collector becomes obvious. With pride we offer the art work of today's Spanish master painter, Royo, to the art connoisseurs of the world.

El Manton.

Original Oil on Canvas. 22 x 15".

La Florista.

Original oil on panel. 36 x 29".

La Calma.

Original oil on panel. 29 x 24".

Eterea.

Original oil on panel. 23 1/2 x 28 1/2". SOLD.

Belleza (Beauty).

Original oil on panel. 22 x 15".

Raza (Race).

2012. Original Oil on Canvas. 35 x 46". SOLD.

Odalisca.

Original Oil on Canvas. 46 x 35".

Ensonacion (Dreaming).

Original Oil on Canvas. 22 x 15".

Luz Suave (Soft Light).

Original Oil o Canvas. 24 x 29".

Expresion.

Original oil on panel. 20 x 20".

En el Espejo (In the Mirror).

2009. Original Oil on Canvas. 49 x 24".

El Paseo (The Walk).

Original Oil on Canvas. 35 x 46".

Pino.

Original oil on panel. 20 x 20".

Gustavo Torres.

(1967-)

Gustave Torres was born in Guadalajara, Mexico where he began sculpting and training with accomplished artists such as Luis Larios at a very young age. Torres left Mexico in 1991 after receiving his Bachelors of Fine Art at the University of Guadalajara to pursue a career in the United States.

Torres is both a talented visual artist and a master craftsman. His visual imagery reflects the deep, quiet spirit of antiquity, and rough finger work and carefully chosen patinas convey a worn, earthy presence. The power of his art is in its simplicity, tranquility and connection to life. With references to both ancient Mayan art and the sculptures of Giacometti, Torres’ style is both primitive and abstract, and he strives to create a “spiritual balance” in his art. His statement that “art without spirit is nothing” demonstrates his reverence for life. His driving desire is to connect his work to others on a spiritual level, and each piece begins with a fragment of his own past. “The form is just the beginning. The rest is left to each person’s connection as they add their own experience and spirit,” he says.

Torres describes himself as an old-fashioned sculptor because he uses centuries-old lost-wax casting techniques to create his bronzes. He is directly involved with each stage of the creation of every piece from the mold making to the careful application of the patina.

Torres currently resides in Northern California. His sculptures have been exhibited at the Carmel Arts Association and prominent fine art galleries throughout the country. Torres is an award-winning artist, has received a Gold Medal in National Competition in Guadalajara, and has been featured in publications worldwide.

Torso.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 30" H.

Living Pompeii.

Bronze. 24 x 24 x 5 1/4". One of a kind. SOLD.

Un Comenzar ( A New Beginning).

Bronze. Edition of 25. 23" H.

Pilar.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 63 x 11 x 11".

Torso. Lifesize.

Bronze. Edition of 8. 67" Height.

My Own Journey.

Bronze. Edition of 20. 20" Height. Also available in life-size 60" H. Edition of 12.

Celeste.

Bronze. Edition of 30. 19" Height.

Libertad.

Bronze. Edition of 20. 25" Height.

Pilar.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 66" H.

Volar (To Fly).

Bronze. Edition of 100. 13" Height.

Amistad.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 16 1/2" Height.

Helena.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 66" Height.

Sarah (Angel).

Bronze. Edition of 20. 28 x 3 1/2 x 3 1/2".

Angel on Wheel.

Bronze. Edition of 20. 20" Height.

Caras.

Bronze. Edition of 25. 20" Height.

Espanola.

Bronze. Edition of 12. 38" Height.

Hunter.

Bronze. Edition of 20. 34" Height.

Icarus Group.

Bronze. Edition of 100. 8-11" Height.

Gustavo in his California studio.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Though his life was short, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's artistic legacy resounds today. His dramatic and innovative style was perfectly suited to commercial pursuits. In fact, his poster designs, with their strong outlining and bold use of color, are so impactful that they have become cultural icons. The artist's infatuation with lithography led to the creation of well over 300 original prints and 30 posters which are still considered "state of the art" after a hundred years.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec came from an aristocratic background, having been born the son of an earl. Even as a schoolboy, he showed a talent for drawing, covering every paper and book margin with subjects he knew, mainly farm animals, horses and riders. At 14, his family arranged for him to take lessons from animal painter Rene Princeteau in Paris. By this time, already, he had suffered two riding accidents which eventually left him crippled for life.

At the age of 18, he made the final decision to stay in Paris and study art seriously. He found lodgings in Montmartre and mingled with its denizens, honing his craft among like-minded contemporaries, among them were Leon Bonnat, Fernand Cormon, Louis Anquentin, Emile Bernard, as well as Degas and Van Gogh. He became a frequenter of the cafes, cabarets and brothels of the neighborhood, drawing from them inspirations for his artistic themes. Among his early patrons was Aristide Bruant, a rough hewn entertainer who owned the Mirliton, one of Toulouse-Lautrec's favorite haunts; Bruant 3exhibited his work, published some of it in his magazine (also called Le Mirliton), and later gave him poster assignments. As the artist's stature grew, he found other magazines eager to publish his work, among them La Revue Blanche, L'Escarmouche and Le Rire. His subjects continued to be the types he came in contact during his rounds: many of them anonymous loafers, street girls, vendors and the like, but also some of the famous music hall artists who became his friends, such as the singer Yvette Guilbert, can can dancers Jane Avril and La Goulue, stage stars May Milton, Yahne, May Belfort and many others. In 1896, he published a collection of lithographs, Elles, with scenes from the local brothels. He became absorbed in the night life of Montmartre until he himself was an indispensable part of it.

From the beginning his drawings showed an herring eye for catching facial characteristics, expressions and mannerisms with deadly accuracy and yet with the most sparing means, a few lines, a carefully chosen perspective, or an imperceptible emphasis that focuses our attention.

In 1891, Toulouse-Lautrec was greatly impressed with Pierre Bonnard's France Champagne poster and decided to investigate the potential of lithography. Working with Bonnard's lithographer Ancourt, he learned the craft from the bottom up - and within months, brought it to an unprecedented artistic zenith. He managed to cram some 400 lithographs into the remaining ten years of his life, 31 of which were posters, and all of which were the cream of graphic design. His masterpieces define the limits of poster style: where Cheret epitomizes a completely external, impersonal viewpoint, Toulouse-Lautrec is the embodiment of internal, personal vision with a point to make- not, to be sure, a moral judgement, but rather an amused, wry observation on the passing scene.

Virtually all posterists then and since have had to make their stance somewhere between these two poles. True, some may have tried a satirical bite more vicious than Lautrec's or a neutrality even more profound than Cheret's but none could surpass the sheer mastery of their pioneers. The best proof is that a century later, their work still sparkles with all its force, inventiveness and beauty, and each in his way is more popular than they ever were in their own lifetimes.

Debauche.

1896. Original lithograph. Hand signed in black crayon. Also bearing the artist's monogram in the stone. Edition of 100. 11 1/16 x 15". SOLD.

Troupe de Mlle. Eglantine.

1896. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone with the artist's script signature and monogram. 24 1/4 x 31 1/2".

Une Redoute au Moulin Rouge (A Gala Evening at the Moulin Rouge).

1893. Original lithograph printed in black ink on wove paper. Signed with the artist's monogram stamp in red ink lower right. Also signed in the stone lower left. From the edition of 50. 22 x 15".

Bruant au Mirliton.

1893. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone with the artist's monogram. 31 1/2 x 23 1/4". SOLD.

Carnaval.

1894. Original lithograph. Hand signed in pencil. From the edition of 100.

Brandes et Leloir Dans Cabotins.

1894. Original lithograph. Signed with the artist's monogram stamp. From the edition of approx. 30. 22 x 15".

Pauvre Pierreuse (Poor Prostitute).

1893. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone with the artist's monogram device. Music and lyrics printed on the verso. 10 13/16 x 7 5/8".

1894. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone with the artist's monogram upper left. One of 15 impressions on this paper of an overall edition of 40. 20 13/16 x 14 1/8".

Judic.

1894. Original lithograph. Signed on the stone with the artist's monogram device. From the edition of 100. 14 7/8 x 11".

Moulin Rouge. La Goulue.

1898. Original lithograph. Maitres de L'Affiche. 12 15/16 x 9 1/8".

Jane Avril.

Original lithograph. Maitres de L'Affiche. Pl. 110/256.

La Chaine Simpson.

Original lithograph from Les Maitres de L'Affiche.

Andy Warhol.

(1928 Pittsburgh - 1987 New York)

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.

Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.

Andrej Warhola died in 1942, the same year that Andy entered Schenley High School. Recognizing his son’s talent, Andrej had saved money to pay for his college education. Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) from 1945 to 1949. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design with the goal of becoming a commercial illustrator. During these years he worked in the display department at Horne’s department store.

Soon after graduating, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His work debuted in Glamour magazine in September 1949. Warhol became one of the most successful illustrators of the 1950s, winning numerous awards. He had a unique, whimsical style of drawing that belied its frequent sources: traced photographs and imagery. At times Warhol employed the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother, who was always credited as “Andy Warhol’s Mother,” Julia Warhola left Pittsburgh in 1952 and lived with her son for almost 20 years before her death in Pittsburgh in 1972.

Warhol rewarded himself for his hard work by taking a round-the-world vacation with his friend Charles Lisanby from June 16 to August 12, 1956. They toured Hawaii and many countries in Asia and Europe. It was Warhol’s first trip abroad and a significant event in his life.

Serendipity 3, a trendy restaurant and ice cream parlor located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was a place where Warhol sometimes exhibited his work. He often held parties there--his friends could gorge themselves on the restaurant’s signature “frrrozen hot chocolate” while helping Warhol hand-color his self-published artists’ books.

In the late 1950s, Warhol began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first Pop paintings, which he based on comics and ads, in 1961. The following year marked the beginning of Warhol’s celebrity. He debuted his famous Campbell’s Soup Can series, which caused a sensation in the art world. Shortly thereafter he began a large sequence of movie star portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol also started his series of “death and disaster” paintings at that time.

Between 1963 and 1968 Warhol worked with his Superstar performers and various other people to create hundreds of films. These films were scripted and improvised, ranging from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and sexploitation features. His works include Empire (1964), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and the Screen Tests(1964-66).

Warhol’s first exhibition of sculptures was held in 1964. It included hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes, including Brillo Boxes and Heinz Boxes. For this occasion, he premiered his new studio, painted silver and known as “The Factory”. It quickly became “the” place to be in New York; parties held there were mentioned in gossip columns throughout the country. Warhol held court at Max’s Kansas City, a nightclub that was a popular hangout among artists and celebrities. By the mid-1960s he was a frequent presence in magazines and the media.

Warhol expanded into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured The Velvet Underground, a rock band. In 1966 Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

Warhol self-published a large series of artists’ books in the 1950s, but the first one to be mass-produced was Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), published in 1967. Two years later he co-founded Interview, a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture. Interview is still in circulation today. His later books include THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), Exposures (1979), POPism (1980),and America (1985). Most of his books were based on transcribed conversations.

In 1974, Warhol started a series of Time Capsules: cardboard boxes that he filled with the materials of his everyday life, including mail, photos, art, clothing, collectibles, etc. The artist produced over 600 of them and they are now an archival goldmine of his life and times.

Throughout the 1970s Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens—and soon hundreds—of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, musicians and film stars. Celebrity portraits developed into a significant aspect of his career and a main source of income. He was a regular partygoer at Studio 54, the famous New York disco, along with celebrities such as fashion designer Halston, entertainer Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger.

In 1984, Warhol collaborated with the young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. Warhol returned to painting with a brush for these artworks, briefly abandoning the silkscreen method he had used exclusively since 1962.

In the mid-1980s his television shows, Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes were broadcast on New York cable television and nationally on MTV. He created work for Saturday Night Live, appeared in an episode of The Love Boat and produced music videos for rock bands such as The Cars. Warhol also signed with a few modeling agencies, appearing in fashion shows and numerous print and television ads.

Warhol was a prolific artist, producing numerous works through the 1970s and 1980s. His paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings from this period include: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, and Camouflage. Warhol’s final two exhibitions were his series of Last Supperpaintings, shown in Milan and his Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid), exhibited in New York. Both shows opened in January 1987, one month before his death.

Campbell's Soup I : Vegetable.

1968. Original screen print. Hand signed on the verso. From the edition of 250. 35 x 23". SOLD.

Bruno Zupan.

(1939-)

Bruno Zupan was born June 21, 1939 in Trbovlje, Slovenia and graduated from the Art Institute in Zagreb, Croatia before emigrating to Paris in 1962 at the age of twenty-three. He left Paris in 1964 for New York and became an American citizen in 1969. He has exhibited widely with over 200 exhibitions in museums and galleries on three continents. In 1976, he was awarded life membership in the Society of French Artists.

Zupan prefers to paint directly from nature rather than in a studio, and his locations of choice are Mallorca, Venice and Paris. He must have a deep emotional relationship with the subjects he chooses to paint, and that intimacy allows him the freedom of expression best described by ArtSpeak critic Ed McCormick:

"The real magic is in the paint surface itself, with its energetic bravura strokes, splashes, splatters, and drips forming a unified statement, as active, alive and visually autonomous as an Abstract Expressionist work by de Kooning or Diebenkorn- yet simultaneously evoking the world outside the canvas. Among contemporary painters, Bruno Zupan alone possesses the singular sensibility to strike such a perfect balance between surface and subject, between a convincing pictorial lyricism and the matter of fact materiality that is even larger truth and triumph of the most advanced modern art."